Figured it was time I actually posted something done in Hitfilm on here.Presented are two works in progress. Also, my first two mocha camera solves, incidentally.Again, works in progress--Things I already know need to be fixed include refining the masks for sky replacement, and the crash shot needs to have the layer stack tweaked a bit since a couple of things are compositing incorrectly.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBNzy_JwWFwhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P5G67YBg6Q&feature=youtu.beShuttle Crash Updated with newer version, 7/22/13, fixing stacking order problem...

Comments

I tidied this up for you. The collision and explosion with the mountain in the 2nd clip is really cool, it has a good sense of scale.The extreme red of the Martian background feels more like an extreme grade than an actual red planet. It's a bit too saturated - check out some of NASA's Mars shots and you'll see Mars look a lot duller, more like an orange-red-sand desert here on Earth.The ships and their exhausts don't seem to be graded in the same way, either, so their bright colours stick out unexpectedly.Also: BABYLON 5.

Simon, thanks very very much for the cleanup.rtrowbridge, Videoblocks.com and I have absolutely no idea at all how "Mars" could look ANYthing like Monument Valley in Utah. ;-)Actually--it's not Mars anymore--the shots started out simply as my first attempt to do a mocha solve and match in a 3D model. The shuttle I downloaded from turbosquid, but it's modeller chose to save it in an "action pose" orientation, rather than neutral. That was making it a pain to deal with, so I replaced it with a Thunderbolt that came, oddly enough, in an add-on pack to the astronomical program Celestia (where, if I go to Epsilon Eridani, I see Babylon 5 with ships orbiting....) Given my happiness with the two shots that exist, I've decided that I have to generate the shots that go from points B (Thunderbolt opens fire) to point C (Shuttle crashes), and that I have to add in point A (initial setup) as well.... Even in a blatant SFX sequence, like one ship shooting down another ship, my storytelling instincts have kicked in... What we have now are two storyboard shots for a short film. Point A will begin with a 2.5D Nebula shot that everyone does after viewing Simon's tutorial, so whatever the planet is--it's not Mars.Although Simon is correct in that, if I were staying Mars, I'd want to look at the Nasa shots sitting on my hard drive.For reference: The scale was achieved by using the mocha nulls to place the Thunderbolt in proximity to a mesa spire and scaling it to be about the right size as seen from the camera. The shuttle was then moved next to the Thunderbolt and scaled by eye. I used the Thunderbolt's cockpit and the Shuttle's windows as reference for each other. So I am VERY happy with the scale in the crash shot.Incidentally, this means the models are very very small in 3D space---zooming into the Thunderbolt in an orthographic view requires a zoom level of one-mouse-click-before maximum to get the T-bolt to fill the frame. Mocha is an amazing tool, but it doesn't know scale, and it's places the tracking points for the mesa only about 1500 away from the camera.The other challenge in the crashing shot was to get the debris to react correctly with the mesa. I hadn't planned to to a crashing spaceship when I tracked the shot, so I hadn't tracked nulls on the vertical rise of the mesa space. I considered going back into mocha, tracking the mesa rise for about 5 seconds to get nulls for it, but ended up just eyeballing a plane into position using the nulls for the mesa's base as reference.Color Grading: In both shots there's a Color Grade Layer at the very top of the Layer Stack. Just a Vibrance, and a Color Temp (and lens Dirt). Earlier versions used a Hue Colorize, and everything was much much much more red---I'd had to crank up the green in the exhaust just to get the final render to be yellow. Replacing the Hue Colorize with a Color Temp gave a more realistic (but, yes, extreme) tint, and the exhaust is being colored by the same grade, but, damn, it's green as all hell right now.At the moment these shots are being put to bed, pending getting the other shots in the sequence laid out and animated.To do list for these shots (some of which must wait until resat of sequence is designed:Cleanup sky replacement masks--both shots have a some wobble and flicker. (Sky replacement is driven by brightness/contrast before a threshold, then a luma key. I can pre-grade more before the threshold, but I suspect I'm still going to have to do some roto.)Dial back the green glows.Redo Sky Replacement---right now there's just Six sets of particle clouds in different colors picked fromthe source video, but right now the sky's just a bit dark and blah.Set up Environment Maps. There's an issue there, I'll ask in another thread.Optimize Particle Systems--There are six sets of particle clouds in each shot for sky replacement. The explosion has four different particle systems driving flame clouds, three layers of stock footage explosions, and two particle systems driving debris--one, of course, being a mobile emitter--AND an Oil Fire preset. Plus the flame and smoke emitters from the pre-crash shuttle. Settings need to be tweaked, especially to see if I can reduce the number of particles.That crash shot is taking 12 hours to render on an i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.4GHZ, 16 GB RAM and 2GB NVidia 580EX GPU! For contrast, the flyby shot, which only has six particle clouds for sky replacement, and two particle systems for weapons fire (flash and projectiles) renders in 20 minutes.... That exploision is.... intensive.The Crash scene brings to mind some questions, but I'll take that to a new thread.Finally, Simon---We must assume that particular Thunderbolt was salvaged by raiders following the Earth Civil War, as the pulse discharge cannon on a Thunderbolt doesn't have the rate of fire my animation shows--Looks like those raiders replaced the pulse cannons with gatling cannon firing 1200 projectiles/minute. For certainly, no EA pilot would fire on an unarmed, civilian shuttle, unless he was some misguided supporter of that rat-bastard, President Clarke.In the final versions, once the other shots have been laid out, I will likely replace the Thunderbolt and Nasa concept shuttle with different models.

would lowering the saturation on the exported video and regrade it with vibrance, color and contrast get you the results you are looking for? might give it a more realistic feel...also I am not sure if there is enough oxygen on mars for the fire to keep burning....maybe more of a flash with lots of debris and dust?

I can't quite tell ya what look I'm going for, since these shots are about to get parked. As tests of mocha motion tracking and compositing 3D elements I am happy with them. Especially that explosion which, while unrealistic, is pretty damn cool.But, well, i always say VFX are part of a story, and I realized that I need to finish the whole sequence of events... and, analyzing the flight paths I gave the shuttle and fighter pilot, I actually got a couple hints of character. So... for these two shots I am keeping the motion track and the ship motion paths and the explosion setup and scrapping everything else.These shots I dubbed "MARS" pretty much because I used a Thunderbolt, and, really, who can forget the first time we saw one of those bad boys?(I will fistfight to defend the thesis that the Starfury is the coolest, best designed fighter in sci-fi.)Anyway, my initial color thought was this.http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090607235045/babylon5/images/thumb/0/08/Mars_-_Solis_Planum.jpg/800px-Mars_-_Solis_Planum.jpgOf course.But thank you for putting the though into it---I do want more debris and dust....But it depends on the new models I use. :-)

A new render of the crash.Just focusing on the crash itself--less firey, more smoky and dusty.I don't know if it's how I re-did my explosion particle layers, the fact that I cut out bit of layers that had no media, or turning off sky replacement or a combination of factors, but this version took under three hours to render--the previous version took fifteen hours to render.http://youtu.be/2oLBKUJApnw

There's a few lighting glitches where things pop brighter or darker which would be worth eliminating.Also, the fire out the back of the ship looks like the whole effect is parented to the ship's position, so all the particles are moving with it. It'd look better to parent only the emitter, as then the particles will act more naturally once they're been emittered, rather than the entire particle shape rotating around.

Triem23- Just out of curiosity, where do you get your sound fx?I like the blast pattern but it looks a little metalic- like the ship hit the ground and flattened like a pancake rather than some type of soil. If possible, maybe change the texture. Also a few rocks and/or debris fragments eminating from the explosion and landing on the ground? That can be done with a particle effect.

@ Perfectance: The more recent upload of the shuttle crash doesn't have any sky replacement on it. Since I was really just finessing the actual explosion, I turned off the mask layers for the video, and the two planes and 6 particle sims driving the sky replacment to speed up the render. But i DO like the look of how the original sky warmed up with the grade, and it IS close to the colors I want--but I will be aiming for a bit more cloudy roil.The cam shake for the explosion is still there, but I moved it about a second later and turned the intensity down--my reasoning was this: The earler version had cam shake right when the explosion began, but the shockwave hasn't had time to reach the camera position, yet. So the cam shakes being delayed is a bit more "realistic." However, I've cranked up the intensity again, because a subtle camera shake doesn't work when the original footage already has a fair amount of shake and judder to it.I've also cranked up the bits of camera shake when the shuttle and Thunderbolt pass by the camera.@Simon--Part of what I tried with the render is what I'm going to call "Optimizing my timeline." By which I mean I checked how long particles were in view and adjusted particle life. I took my ship rigs and moved them to their own composite shots, then I did things like split the thunderbolt into seperate instances and deleted the instances where the Thunderbolt is out of frame. What I was trying to accomplish was to speed up the render time by reducing the things Hitfilm has to look at---a 3D model may be out of frame, but Hitfilm still has to calculate it's position and light it, because it might cast a shadow into camera view, right?It must have basically worked, because the first version rendered in 15 hours, the current version rendered in 3.But I moved the fire from the shuttle into it's composite shot rig, so, yes, the fire is basically moving the with the layer and not the emitter.@ Stormy: Stormy, I started in sound editing back in the 90's, so, over the years I've accumulated a LOT of sound FX--I have a CD binder of some 250 SFX CD's currently ripped and stored in my library. I ALSO have the 4 volume Digital Juice library, and I ALSO have the 10 volume Sony Production SFX library. On top of that, I ALSO have my own personal recordings from when I built stuff from scratch. However, for the two spaceship shots, all the sound elements happen to come from the Sony production library, Vol. 5-6-7. For the Halloween logo test, that's a combination of Digital Juice elements and my own personal stash.Stormy, if you look at the earler version of the crash you'll see more solid debris flying out of the explosion and sitting on the ground--In fact, it's composited incorrectly over the fire. For the current version, it looks like I accidentally turned that layer off.Again, thanks everyone for the feedback. The primary goal of the shot was to get the explosion comped into the 2D video with the correct sense of scale, and to get deflectors set up correctly so that smoke and debris reacted correctly with the mesa. That's obviously working alright.Things to do on this shot:1) Redo sky replacement.2) REPLACE MODELS. (This started as a simple mocha test--it's becoming a short film, and a NASA concept shuttle and Thunderbolt don't work anymore---it's off to Blender to build and hackjob.)3) More ground debris and enhance the blast pattern:@ all of you. The "Blast Pattern" was made by starting with a 50% grey square in photoshop. Over that, I applied another layer with a basic lens flare. The lens flare was desaturated and a "chrome curve" applied. The lens flare was copied to an alpha channel then used to drive Photoshop's LIghting Effects on the grey plane. (This is a quick way to get pretty good 2d maps for crater impacts, since the flare has concentric circles and rays that become a G2H map.) The entire image was exported as a .png and brought into hitfilm, turned into a 3D plane, aligned with the appropriate tracking nulls and compositied in Overlay mode.But I forgot to uncheck "Illuminated" in the material properties.Stupid, silly one-click fix. ;-)

(Actually, we caught three people last year trying to steal props. However, the maze enclosure is a 35x35 ft area with 32 security cameras in the area, and none of the would-be thieves made it more than a hallway before we had them intercepted, recovered our props and escorted off the premises.)

Thanks! (Incidentally, the rules we did with the burlesque girls, also earler in this thread, has a quick bit showing a small group walking thru the first half of last year's maze, which kinda shows how extensive the camera coverage in there is!)

Just playing with a model and an environment map.I SHOULD have been finishing that concert I have to deliver for duplication on Friday, but, heck with it, I DO have Thursday to finish--it's just the last few client-requested changes, and editors go crazy if they don't play at times.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vYNoJiaZYY

That looks really nice, especially the camera movements! I just feel like the helicopter should be going a bit faster in the middle, and the landing should be a bit slower towards the end. Other than that, it looked really convincing!